


Revolution

by FHC_Lynn



Series: Metamorphose [2]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-27 10:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8397292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FHC_Lynn/pseuds/FHC_Lynn
Summary: The struggle for resources defines many a moment in history. It might have all gone differently if someone had listened to Starscream.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: the first moment  
> Notes: Inspired by the October Collection going on now.

“Flitter Numbers Plummet!”: the headline barely registered in the general populace's mind.

Cybertron’s native life had begun to fail before the Golden Age had. When the resources for _mechs_ became harder to come by, mechs had simply taken it from their world. Each passing cycle they pulled more and more.

Until they looked up and realized all the flitters were long gone.

Never the most numerous of mechanimals, the sole avian surviving Cybertron’s long-ago great war for freedom had still been a common enough sight over the crystal spires rising from the slush flats. The slush itself was fed by the upwellings of molten minerals and powerful acids from below mixing together, until stronger elemental attraction locked the minerals to the bottom of the crystals and evaporation took the acid to the stratosphere. The heavy crystals floated on the dense solution that fed their growth from the bottom up. It created an ever-changing landscape spanning the horizon. A dangerous place.

The flitters ranged over it, picking off the ant-droids that built their homes in the spires' branches and fed off the same upwellings as the flats and crystals. They built their own homes there, too, from thin cast-off crystals or any scavenged materials they found.

When the flitters' numbers declined, the vermin droids propagated wildly. They got into the miners' equipment, harvesting bits off of tools and machines for their colonies. They also would infest mechs, eating them from the inside out.

Some few scientists tried to warn the Senate then, only to be ignored. Some others looked out to other planets, hoping that by suggesting and founding far-off colonies, the strain on their planet's resources could be eased. Some even tried to research other alternatives in underfunded laboratories.

When the rich finally looked at the deficit in their budgets, they lowered wages. Strikes began. The rich demanded police action. Riots followed.

Standing in the depths of the treacherous slush flats, Starscream held the last known flitter’s corpse in his hands. Skyfire's earnest fear for the future of their kind echoed through his memory.

Skyfire himself was lost to the dangers of their plans. And Starscream had been tried and convicted for his death, and made to grieve his lover in hard labor on the very slush flats that had sent them into the stars.

Starscream turned the fragile, lifeless body over and over in his hands and contemplated the empty, silent skies. No one had seen a live flitter for a decade. He held the first dead one seen in seven years. The ant droids were winning the competition for resources, but Starscream knew those resources were dwindling, too.

His kind had taken far too much. So much.

In the smelting pit of nearby Kaon's work forces, the police and the rich backing them were losing the war they did not yet see happening. Starscream, holding the tiny dead flitter in his own scarred hands, remembered that headline as the beginning of the end. The first moment of death.


End file.
